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The chickens are coming home to roost, and the roosters are strutting their stuff in the coop. We indulge these metaphors with no offense meant to the poultry, but because they so aptly convey all the frantic clucking and insistent cock-a-doodle-do resounding in the White House and the hollow halls of Congress. The proximate cause of the clamor is the remarkable discovery by our civil servants that we face trillion-dollar deficits as far as their blood-shot eyes can see.

You might well ask: How can even such famously inattentive beings miss a trillion-dollar-plus deficit that has been hiding in plain sight? Simple: by paying it no mind, and no mind pretty well explains the average solon's inability to deal with a problem no matter what it might be.

Prompting this belated concern over what our wayward ways have wrought is the necessity of raising the limit on the national debt (which stands at a mere $14.3 trillion), and doing it pronto, or finding ourselves unable to add to our humongous pile of borrowings and leaving the government high and dry without enough moola to keep operating. Having just escaped by the skin of his teeth such a contingency by grace of a last-minute deal on the budget for the rest of this fiscal year, which ends in September, Uncle Sam finds himself again beset by the specter of a shutdown.

Carrying the banner into the battle of the budgets for the Republicans is Congressman Paul Ryan, who wants to chop down that $14.3 trillion by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years by, among other things, effectively ending Medicare as we know it. For the Democrats, the president offers a plan that would trim the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years; to help achieve that noble end, he'd boost taxes on rich folks. Endearingly typical of Washington is that the way it chooses to get around an impasse on spending in the next five months is to come up with solutions 10 to 12 years out.

Besides a fast-approaching point of no return on lifting the debt ceiling, the leading combatants as they rush to cross swords may be inspired by something grander than fiscal probity. A movie version of Ayn Rand's 1957 work of fiction, Atlas Shrugged, has just hit the multiplexes. Mr. Ryan is a huge fan of the late Ms. Rand. It's by no means inconceivable that when he gazes in the mirror, he pictures himself bravely slashing the budget as the latter day incarnation of John Galt, the novel's stalwart hero, and trusts that the masses, once they catch the film, will feel that way, too. (OK, he bears more of a resemblance to Woody Allen than Gary Cooper, but looks aren't everything.)

As for Mr. Obama, who has spent a good many hours of his presidency practicing how to move backward as rapidly as possible at the first hint of a tussle, his sudden decision to abandon his well-earned reputation as a champion compromiser, even before he knows what the argument's about, came with an epiphany: A heap of voters believe deficits are the work of the devil. Remarkably, that marvelous revelation just happens to coincide with his declaration that he will run for re-election next year.

We suspect that in the end, amidst the usual sound and the fury, the debt ceiling will be raised enough one way or another to permit the government to stumble along through the rest of this fiscal year, anyway. But the sound and fury, we regret to say, are destined to be with us from this moment on until November 2012—with extended timeouts, of course, for Congress and the president to attend the really serious business of hustling funds for their coming campaigns and to allow Joe Biden to take his daily nap in the comfort of his own bed instead of on the job feigning to listen to Mr. Obama yak away.

We'd have more faith in the newfound piety of fiscal responsibility professed by both of the parties to the debate if either boasted even a short history of concern when our blessed government took to running merrily in the red. Mr. Ryan, so far as we can tell, never uttered a disapproving peep in the Bush years when surpluses vanished and gave way to dramatically upward spiraling deficits. For his part, Mr. Obama appeared almost serene when confronted by the Treasury's gapping trillion-dollar spreads between outgo and income on his watch.

Now the fat's in the fire, and the contest is on to see who can wield the axe not more judiciously but more emphatically—or, should we say, more theatrically? Whatever the approach and whatever its merits, the immediate effects on the still hesitant economy of the gathering fervor to shave the budget are not likely to be benign. At the very least, the recovery is likely to slow from its present lackadaisical pace to little more than a shuffle.

There's this, too: If, as Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley contended, the Supreme Court follows the elections (he wasn't around when the court switched to deciding elections), the Federal Reserve tries to anticipate the results of the balloting. So Bernanke & Co., already a bit antsy over rocketing gasoline and food prices, may well be inclined to read the current hubbub about deficits as an indication of which way the political winds are blowing and cut back on the stimulus that has been such a powerful spur to what growth the economy has been able to muster.

To narrow the focus to our own particular turf, a loss of vigor in the recovery would affect different markets differently. It could be, for example, something of a tonic for the dollar and bonds. But we can't quite see it as anything but a drag for equities.

IF BY SOME REMOTE CHANCE we're right and the market is in for some rough going, what's an inveterate investor to do? Well, he or she, we suppose, could always kick the habit and take up knitting or go watch a cricket game. But perhaps you're not ready for such extreme measures, especially since they hold the grave risk of boring you to death. Happily, Michael O'Higgins offers a more palatable alternative.

Mike is the main man at Miami-based, eponymous O'Higgins Asset Management and someone we've known for more than a few years. One of his claims to fame is to have invented the Dogs of the Dow approach to investing, which is based on the idea that one year's worst performers more often than not become the following year's big winners.

Among his virtues are a rare combination of Street and real-world smarts, and, even rarer among portfolio pros, he's unfailingly candid. As he readily confesses in a piece written for Marc Faber's latest Gloom, Boom and Doom report, he has no special powers that enable him to foretell the future. So if you're desperately seeking a tip from the modern equivalent of Nostradamus, Mike's not your man.

But decades of investing have enriched him with considerable insight into the workings of markets, their tendencies, quirks and history. And using elements of his Dogs-of-the-Dow technique, he's come up with an intriguing investment strategy called MOAR, an acronym for Michael O'Higgins Absolute Return.

It calls for a diversified portfolio that includes what he dubs as Dogs of the World, which consists of the five most undervalued investable global stock markets, a comforting exposure to gold and U.S. intermediate-term Treasury notes instead of cash.

After every losing year by the Dogs of the World, he takes five percentage points from each of the other categories and overweights the Dogs, again playing the odds that they'll outperform. If and when stocks rebound, he sedulously brings the equity portions of the portfolio to normal in 15-percentage-point increments.

The proof of the pudding, notes Mike, is that, using this technique, beginning in 1996 (his performance numbers of Dogs of the World go back only to '95), MOAR would have appreciably outperformed every major stock index, long-and-intermediate term bonds, gold, cash and inflation and done so with only a single down year.

In constructing his MOAR portfolio, he has carefully striven to make it capable of prevailing against what he envisions as two possible if opposite threats: from inflation fed by the easy-money policies so popular with governments everywhere or a wave of deflation as the mountains of debt, private and public, shrink at a faster rate than the central banks are able to print money. A portfolio, in other words, for all seasons.

Obviously, the bottom-line question, which Mike both poses and answers, is specifically how would he structure such a portfolio that "would likely provide an attractive, relatively steady, real inflation-adjusted return" in what is possibly a stretch of scary market years that lie ahead.